by J. D. Landis
He might as well have dreamt of what Dresden would do for him if they wouldn’t even permit a church-begirded memorial service for Chopin, who had done the city the retrospective honor of coming to it even before the age of twenty and had played here at least three years before he had played in Paris. This was Chopin’s Germany city, and it would not even pray for his soul. What would it do for the soul of Robert Schumann?
What would Düsseldorf do?
He wrote a song:
Oh, what do they do in Düsseldorf?
In Düsseldorf what do they do?
They apportion a ration
Of Bach’s St. John’s Passion
In Düsseldorf that’s what they do.
And because they were French
Until eighteen fifteen They have sex all the time
With no thought of hygiene,
While the sound of the choir
Can keep to no beat
As it bleats to the heavens like
Hartebeests in heat.
They drink upon rising,
And then they drink more;
As Mendelssohn said,
Half the town’s drunk by four.
But the worst thing ’bout Düsseldorf—
I swear this is true—
Is no one in Düsseldorf
Knows what Düsseldorf do.
“‘Düsseldorf do?’” As usual, he could not tell how much criticism dwelled within the charm of her laughter.
“Sometimes one has to bend the syntax,” he replied, which was his excuse as well when she questioned something in his music.
But it was he who began to question hers. He had her replaced in a performance of his piano quintet because a woman couldn’t understand the complexity of the piano part (and did not all his chamber work give emphasis to the piano?) and then demanded her withdrawal as accompanist of the Düsseldorf chorus for almost the same reason: A woman was too weak for such banging as was required, especially with this chorus, which made more noise shuffling its feet than singing, and better noise it was too.
“Why do you turn against me?” she asked.
“It’s myself I turn against.” He was not so crazy that he failed to understand this: He did not merely take out his frustrations upon her, which was common enough behavior even for men whose marriages were matters more of contiguity than of enchantment; he deliberately did what he knew would hurt her most, because he never suffered so much as when she suffered. That he should have inflicted the pain caused him all the more anguish.
Still, he saw she tried to help him. She took to the piano during rehearsals of his orchestra and marked time with her head far more accurately than did he with his intractable baton from the conductor’s desk. So taken was he with that bobbing movement of her head, mouth open, eyes half-closed, that he looked at her instead of at the score and conducted accordingly, which further distorted his intentions and thus the tempo of whatever music they were jointly, if surreptitously, conducting together.
But she was not there—not on the stage—when he scandalized all of musical Düsseldorf in conducting Hauptmann’s mass at the Maximiliankirche.
The entire piece went exceedingly well. He conducted brilliantly—even he knew this, and such knowledge was difficult to come by for any conductor, who is as engulfed by the music flying from his hands as a painter is by the colors he no sooner gives off than they assail his eyes and blind him to their worth and thus to his own.
The singers had sung more competently than he might have expected, given their disgraceful behavior during rehearsals, when they would sit down while singing and bang their feet to the music in protest against what they considered his indolent tempos, wholly unappreciative of his informing them that the more slowly God was celebrated, the more likely He was to have time in His busy schedule to hear the music!
And the musicians made their entrances when they ought to have, again contradicting such rehearsals as when he was forced to rebuke the trombone player for performing his solo so softly, only to be informed that the trombone player had missed his cue entirely and played not a single note. “So what was it I heard?” “Silence,” came the answer, which brought him great pleasure.
As for himself, he did not once either drop or throw his baton, which had become for him such a commonplace in rehearsals that he had taken to tying it to his wrist with a string, no easy task and performed solo because when he asked Clara to tie it for him, she turned away with tears in her eyes.
Indeed, he believed it was precisely because his performance of Moritz Hauptmann’s mass at the Maximiliankirche was as close to perfection as might be achieved with such singers and musicians that he himself missed his own cue—not to conduct but to stop conducting.
Apparently, for all the singers and for all the musicians and for all the members of the audience—for everyone but himself—the mass came to the end that Herr Hauptmann had intended for it. But he went right on conducting.
It had also come to an end for the priest, who, as was his habit, launched immediately into his sermon, which he found himself delivering from his podium while the conductor, still on his podium, was moving his arms through the air, hands expressive, baton secure and perfectly in tempo to a music so glorious it shared with silence great exclusivity.
It was interesting to him that what finally obscured the music only he could hear was a combination of censure and laughter. He was cursed by some and enjoyed by others.
Such was the life of the artist, he concluded, in the instant before he realized just what it was he was doing that caused this discordancy.
He stopped his arms in mid-flight. He let his eyes sweep over the chorus and orchestra both, most of whom were staring at him with the kind of disdain he had heretofore felt was reserved to himself against them, for their incompetence. He was a tree stripped bare by winter, two limbs only held aloft against the empty sky, and his musicians were his birds, frozen on the ground.
Clara was somewhere behind him in the church. He listened for her laughter, or for some grievous intake of breath in her sympathy with his plight. How to get out of this one, conducting music he alone could hear, while off to his right a priest was intoning with the arrogance of a first violin?
He dropped his baton, purposely this time, and when she did not catch it before it hit the floor, he knew she could save him no longer.
“It was my Beethoven moment,” he told Brahms, who had not been in the church, making light of it, “and you,” he said to Clara, “were my Caroline Ungher,” though she had failed to be. He was affronted when he learned the executive committee of the Düsseldorf Music Society had told Clara that henceforth he would be allowed to conduct his own compositions only, presumably on the theory that he could bring upon them no greater ruin with his conducting than he had in his writing and that should he once again go on conducting after a piece had ended, he might be said this time to be composing, on the spot, a coda that only he, in the privacy of his addled brain, could hear.
“And listen to this, dear one,” he wrote to Brahms upon their first separation when he accompanied Clara on a tour of Holland. “A prince in Friedrich’s Hohenzollern circle came up to me to praise Clara after one of her performances and said, ‘Your wife is a fine musician. Are you musical too?’ Am I musical too! Why was I not offended? It was as if that ignorant, uninformed, fatuous clod of aristocratic fluff could see into my soul. How do we know if we’re musical? How do we know if we’re artists? How do we know if what we hear in our heads and put down on paper is music? All one can express at any moment is himself. What if the self is shattered? What if the self has ceased to exist, long before life has ended? What if I have merely suffered as an artist but, in the end, produced nothing that might be called art? What if all that one’s produced amounts to no more than what Hölderlin called ‘summer’s empty fields’? Not that I raised these questions with my royal interrogator. Oh, no. To him I said, ‘Yes, I am musical too.’ And he politely replied, ‘What instrument d
o you play?’ I held up to him my poor wrecked right hand. ‘I play my wife,’ I said. Needless to say, that rid me of him long before any talk of art might have produced so desired a result. Am I musical? At least enough to judge that you are, Johannes, my dear new friend.”
It became interesting to him, before it became mysterious and then devastating, that he could hear things no one else could hear. This might, after all, define the composer of music, as a unique ability to see things might define the painter or sculptor and the ability to understand (if rarely to explain) things the philosopher and the ability to express things in words the writer.
The first time he tried table-turning, he put the table to the simplest test by asking it to reproduce the rhythm of perhaps the most familiar two bars in all of music: those that opened Beethoven’s C-Minor Symphony. After a delay that caused him to wonder if perhaps this table was not musical even in the most elementary sense (in which case, he would allow it the chance at least to deliver messages from those members of his family who were dead, which should give it more than enough to do in living out its useful, four-legged life), the table began to rock and even more clearly than necessary (it was so slow!) beat out, following a retrospectively observable eighth-note rest, the three famous quavers followed by the semibreve.
“Bravo!” he praised the table, as he had learned to do with his children even when they disappointed him, before he added as demand in the form of constructive criticism, “But the tempo really ought to be faster, dear table.”
The table did not hesitate this time to reproduce the tempo precisely as Beethoven had intended it; indeed, it slammed out the beats with an almost aggressive display of indignation, much like Marie, who, on the verge of turning twelve, no more took to being corrected than did this table.
No wonder he came to love it almost like a child of his own. It could read his mind, at least to the extent of always knowing what number he was thinking and pounding it out for him (provided it was between one and three), and in time let him talk to the dead, though because it possessed no more talent than an ability to rock and in so doing to produce banging upon the floor, he was limited in his questions to eliciting “yes” (one beat) and “no” (two beats) and “perhaps” (three beats) answers and quickly grew tired of conversations, even with the dead, that lacked the subtlety of anything more than grunts and depended upon him, who had withdrawn as deeply as he was able to dibble into himself, to do virtually all the talking.
“I want to do something for the table,” he said, shortly before its first Christmas with them as a tipping-table, and its last, he realizes, as well as his own last Christmas with his family. He has become just such a table himself here in Endenich, beating out answers from beyond the grave, one foot tapping against his coffin, from the inside. As he waits for his wife.
Clara said without hesitating, “How about sending it on a vacation to Russia?” where they had almost ten years earlier nearly frozen to death and Robert had experienced in the droning of the monks of the Simonov Monastery a sound even more nerve-wracking than that of the Düsseldorf choir.
Though she had sat with him and heard the table rock, he noticed she was always peering suspiciously at its nether parts. Skepticism and jealousy had turned her humor bitter.
“Tables know everything,” he said. “Unlike your Nerval,” whose most bitter lines he quoted at her: “‘Il voulait tout savoir mais il n’a rien connu.’”
“As for my table,” he added abruptly so as not to distress her beyond literature’s hem, “I thought I might buy it a new dress,” and he did, for Christmas, a beautiful white tablecloth, while Clara gave him something considerably darker: a portrait of herself by Karl Sohn. True, her face was the face of his child-love, that of a mischievous Madonna, tilted in humble provocation, her small lips almost tastily pulpal, her eyelids heavy but modestly free of blue shadow, her eyes themselves downcast but because of the tilt of her head suggesting not the humility of a penitent but the curiosity of a sensualist (and the gaze of a Düsseldorfer Düsenputzer checker). Yet her hair, shining so clean he could smell it, trussed her head with a confining rigor that suggested imprisonment. And her dress, voluminous and airy because she was pregnant again as if in fecund celebration of the saving grace of the arrival of Johannes, was black. It was the gift of this painting that caused him to consider that, like himself, all she wore now was black. In daylight, anyway. At night she wore what she wore until he took it off or pushed it up. Perhaps that was black too. If it was, it always yielded to the glow her skin gave back to candlelight. Otherwise, she was in mourning.
It was the arrival of Johannes, too, that freed him both to die and to go mad, in that order, as he liked to say, so as to give evidence of the latter and to forfeit the former. With an energy and excitement he remembered from his own youth, he wrote about Brahms for his old magazine and compared him to Athena springing fully rampant from the head of Zeus and called him as well the true Apostle of the new age and new force in music, thus granting a Greek and Roman benediction and replacing, finally, that other Johannes, Ludwig, his John the Baptist. Ludwig Schunke may have been the one they’d been waiting for, but Johannes Brahms even outwardly bore the signs of divinity, proclaiming with his delicate, tensile beauty, “This is the chosen one.”
“He could capsize the world in a few days,” he wrote of his new angel, and thus he did.
He recorded for all the world to read that he and Clara, standing together before Brahms at the piano, were swept into what he called “circles of ever deeper enchantment.”
What a thing it was for them to fall in love with a musician. The body melts into the music; the music saturates the flesh. You cannot separate the beauty of the art from the beauty of the man. Was it any wonder those who made music were in such secular demand? They play, and you are ravaged.
He thought, or at least wished for his whole life, that it would be love that drove him mad. But it was music.
He and Clara went to Hanover, where for almost two weeks he heard more of his own music played than he ever had before. Joseph Joachim was concertmaster there, and he had summoned them, and he had also summoned Brahms, and where Brahms went, they wanted to go. The court orchestra played his Symphony in D Minor, which he had recently revised and had thus moved into the fourth and last position among his symphonies. Joachim gorged on the violin music, playing the Fantasie in public and the three sonatas for invited private audiences, and the new concerto in rehearsal only, thank goodness, for it gave Joachim a great deal of trouble, which allowed Robert the public pleasure of apology to his new young benefactor and a strange sort of private glee over this evidence of the depth of his quarry, what Joachim called a “troubling profundity” so that Robert was able to quip to Clara, “Well, he’s half right.”
It was with these sounds of his own music, played so joyfully and generously by his youthful inheritors of music’s dissident comforts, still in his memory that, back in Düsseldorf, his inner concerts assumed such precedence as to drive all other music away. He could write nothing and hear nothing either in memory or in life itself but what began one night as a single note, repeated and repeated and repeated, in a kind of drone that attained another interval only when he had buried himself in Clara and screamed out his pleasure in the most irreconcilable release of sound, love and terror merged in body and brain. She would not let go of him that whole night, grasping him to her and weeping, so that her tears soaked the Manna on her eyelids, and for the first time he smelled that odor said to have been the cause of the killing of the men of Lemnos by their wives. Rather than repel him, this smell of earth and sex and what he took to be his own decay drove him into her again and finally to a silent release, not that he did not want to call out but that the music in his head had changed, he heard a chord or two and stayed up all night long to listen.
The sounds continued into daylight, when they stopped for two hours during which he found great relief in the sounds of his household—children, dishes, w
ater, the rasping tenor of the fire—and in the utter silence within his head. Yet he longed for the music to return, with the kind of ache that reaches out seditiously for diminishing pain, whether from a wound in the flesh or from the departure of love.
When the music did return, at precisely ten in the morning, which he realized was the time he had most often begun to compose on those mornings when he had not stayed up all night at the piano, it was once again a single, droning, head-crushing, head-exploding note. It was this musical regression as well as the sound itself that caused him to scream out as if to drown it, though he realized as he screamed that he was screaming for help, like a child who is angry not so much at pain as at not having enough experience of the world to be able to understand the pain. He was screaming at life itself.
What he got for his effort was a visit from Dr. Richard Hasenclever, more a friend than doctor; that function was filled in Düsseldorf primarily by Dr. Adolf Böger. But Dr. Hasenclever was much more musical than Dr. Böger, so who better, Clara must have reasoned, than Dr. Hasenclever to interpret the medical meaning of notes sounding within her husband’s head?
Robert was not entirely happy to see Dr. Hasenclever. True, he had recently written music to accompany Dr. Hasenclever’s version of Ludwig Uhland’s Glück von Edenhall. He had done this not so much to please Dr. Hasenclever but to pay homage to Uhland himself, about whom it had been written, as Robert wished someone would write of him:
He says but half what others say
And thus feels twice as much as they.
What bothered Robert was Dr. Hasenclever’s lofty position in the Düsseldorf Music Society. How could he not have been complicit in Robert’s dismissal?
Hasenclever was the kind of doctor who, rather than concentrate all his efforts on medical matters and thus nearly bore to death those he saved from it, involved himself so deeply in the arts that he was of little use to his patients except as an unrelenting chronicler of all the concerts, ballets, operas, recitals, dramas, and poetry readings he had attended. As such, he was of little apparent use to a screaming man. He was accustomed to music in the Schumann home, not this. This was terrible. This was the very antithesis of singing. This was as pure a perversion of music as could be imagined.
